I'm
driving down a street in L.A. the other day and I'm once again struck
by how much this city now looks like Mexico. Remember the old Dragnet
TV series? Forget it. That L.A. doesn't exist now. The sun baked, pastel
cottages where Sgt. Friday would knock on doors are still around, but
these days if you knock on the doors, the greeting from the other side
will often be "Hola." Brown people stare at the few white
people on the sidewalks as though the whites are unwanted vampires who
should go back to their caskets. The looks shot at whites say "How
dare these white U.S. citizens be here? Don't they know that this all
belongs to Mexico and we non-U.S.citizens are the inheritors of this
place, if for no other reason than that we are outbreeding them?"

My car radio is on one of those so-called conservative
talk stations--sandwiched in between the growing number of Spanish language
stations. I'm listening to this old conservative guy who is something
of an institution in the area because he's been at it for so many years.
I listen to his program from time to time, but can't usually take too
much of it. It's like being locked up in an old age home with a bunch
of toothless geezers eating pabulum and telling you about how it used
to be. You want to be polite, but you also want to get out of there
before the grim reaper shows up.

The talk on the radio is all about the California recall election coming
up on October 7--if the court allows it to go forward.

This
talk show host seems to be one of those all or nothing purist types
who would rather lose everything than win something less than everything.
His patter is proving that. He's telling listeners that (sure to lose)
Tom McClintock is the guy to vote for, by gum, and that Arnold Schwarzenegger
isn't a real conservative (Yawn). Talk Show Conservative
Callers (TSCCs), with testosterone-lite voices, then call in and parrot
what the guy says and overlook his lapses in memory and the fact that
what he often says doesn't seem to have much relation to what they're
saying.

Before the current recall election, few Californians, outside of the
really hardcore, fully engaged, think of nothing else immigration reformers,
even knew who McClintock was. To these committed immigration reformers,
however, McClintock has always been a stand up guy. And that, today,
is where his main vocal support is coming from. Unfortunately, these
hardcore immigration reformers are louder than they are numerous.

Anyway, every so often the old conservative radio host
says something that is so unrelated to what a caller is saying that
it sounds as though it's a startle reaction after someone has just nudged
him awake. He's a professional, so he reflexively seems to know how
to cover with some standard sound bridge such as: "Okay, let's
move on to the next caller," which is sometimes said in the middle
of what a caller is saying. The same callers seem to call in day after
day. Most just give emotional opinions. Most support McClintock.

Some of these TSCC callers then predictably praise
a local black conservative talk show host and say that he should run
for president. Read, "Look at me, I'm a white conservative, but
I'm not a racist because I just praised a black guy...oh...not because
he's black, golly gosh, I didn't even notice that, but because he's
a good conservative." Yeah, right. Such callers can't even see
the noblesse oblige racism inherent in such things.

I've heard it all before. Then, to prove that McClintock
is the guy to vote for, the host tells me that McClintock was in the
Boy Scouts while Schwarzenegger was busy chasing women.. Retch! I'm
supposed to like McClintock for that? I'd like to know why the hell
McClintock wasn't chasing girls when most boys his age were. Was he
a goody-goody? Was he dead inside? What's with some of these so-called
conservatives and sex? Why are they so hung-up on the subject? Some
of these guys are still complaining about Clinton's escapades in the
White House. Maybe the life force didn't fully find its way into their
genes or something. Maybe if some of these callers had a stronger life
force, or more testosterone, they would have had more children and wouldn't
have left niches in society to be filled by higher breeding Mexicans,
that they're now, and rightly so, complaining about.

It
sounds as though many of these TSCCs are white, and old, and dying.
What is this? Are conservatives like Shakers? Are they a self-limiting
sect that doesn't birth new members, because they think sex is evil?
And, some of these TSCCs seem to want to take everyone else down with
them as they throw away their votes on McClintock. Lately, McClintock
has been reminding me of bug blood and rat blood sucking Renfield in
the 1931 Dracula movie. He just can't laugh out loud. Instead, he seems
to swallow his laugh through quivering lips. The last guy who reminded
me of Renfield was Steve Forbes. You can almost hear and see all three
of these guys saying "Yes, Master...heh, heh, heh...," while
looking up from the hold of the ship with big black shadows under their
eyes and while rubbing their hands together.

Then the host tells me he's been fighting the good
fight to save California for many years and that illegal immigration
must be stopped, and that McClintock is the guy who will do it. Of course,
what the host doesn't say is that McClintock isn't going to win this
election. The reason isn't because of McClintock's position on illegal
immigration, but because McClintock fails to inspire beyond the choir
that he's been preaching to. I'm not happy about that and I wish it
weren't so, but it is. And, all the TSCC rah rah phone calls won't change
it.

I wonder what it's going to take to get some of these
so-called conservatives into the real world where they'll stop looking
for purity in their candidates and start replacing whining with winning.
Why, if this talk show host has been fighting for many years to save
California are we in worse shape now than ever before and why are we
being de facto annexed to Mexico? Are some so-called conservatives just
slow learners? Can't they see that their way of selling their ideas
doesn't work? They've lost battle after battle and they've backed loser
after loser, and now they're going to do it again with McClintock.

I'm
not buying the goofy TSCC arguments. I've heard such silly purist crap
from various cranks in trailer parks and at gun shows for far too long.
It's time that conservatives or rightists or whatever we want to call
ourselves, start winning elections. We need to start being more clever
than we've been in the past or we're not going to win anything and we'll
end up as marginalized malcontents sitting out in the desert someplace
in the Mexican state of Aztlan, saying things like "Had Bustamante
not won back in '03, sonny, things would be better, and we'd still be
part of the United States." It's time to win, even if we don't
get everything we want.

Despite the fact that there are 135 people trying to
unseat Governor Gray Davis, there are really only three candidates in
the race who have any reasonable chance of being governor: Cruz Bustamante,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Tom McClintock. As I keep writing, McClintock
isn't going to win. It's not in the cards, amigos. The numbers aren't
there. If any of these TSCCs have any correct political instincts they
would understand this. Perhaps, however, their political instincts have
been as sublimated as their sex instincts and perhaps they've all spent
too many years in the Boy Scouts. How else can we explain the fact that
some of these TSCCs, who claim they don't like the Mexicanization of
California, are apparently going to vote for McClintock and thus actually
help Bustamante?

To repeat, my real problem with McClintock is not his
message, but the fact that he's a potential spoiler in this race. He
can take enough votes away from Schwarzenegger to put Bustamante into
office.
It may be pretty late in this column to confess that I'm not happy about
knocking McClintock or other conservatives/rightists including radio
talk show hosts, and the truth is that I like many of their positions.
We also need as many allies in the fight to save California as possible,
so alienating McClintock supporters isn't a great idea. Still, they're
starting to piss me off with this Boy Scout crap and their political
stupidity and with McClintock's campaign calling me with recordings
that tell me he's surging in the polls. What a bunch of phony, whistling-past
the graveyard baloney. He's not surging at all. The guy's got good positions,
but he fails to excite people. I've also been sensing something smug
and smirky about McClintock lately that I don't like. It's almost as
though he's hoping that his presence in the race will doom the Republicans
to another loss so he can get his revenge against the GOP bigs who are
mostly backing Schwarzenegger. Perhaps just thinking about this revenge
is enough to bring on that manic Renfield smile that I think I've seen.

Anyway, McClintock better quickly understand that he's
not the only one who knows that he doesn't have the power to win this
election, but that he may have the power to screw it up and thus make
California even more a colony of Mexico. And, if he does screw it up
by siphoning away votes that would have gone to Schwarzenegger and,
as a result, former MEChA member Bustamante gets elected, McClintock
will probably be finished in politics. If Bustamante gets in, I suspect
that even his best pals in the immigration reform movement will thereafter
always spit when they hear the name McClintock.
There's still time for McClintock to come to his senses and pull out
and throw his support behind Schwarzenegger, but the clock is ticking.

If
Arnold gets into office and then fails to deliver, I'll be the first
to sign a recall petition to get him out of office. I've never bought
the argument that we need to stick with a loser just because we elected
him. That's why I support the recall of Gray Davis and is one of the
reasons I want to see a reform of our political system. I'd like to
see a system that brings in more political parties and has something
of the parliamentary system built in so we can more easily get rid of
bums.

# # #

TWO BOOKS BY H. MILLARD
Available at finer bookstores, by phone, or on the net.

2. THE OUTSIDER - (ISBN: 0-595-19424-9) H. Millards underground classic story of alienation is
available at Amazon.com by clicking on the this link or by
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